Random Trivia
|01/04 = Today is Yumeno Kyuusaku's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |01/10 = Today is Ozaki Kouyou's birth and Oda Sakunosuke's death date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |01/11 = Today is Yamamoto Yuuzou's death date. |01/14 = Today is Lewis Carroll's death date. |01/19 = Today is Edgar Allan Poe's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection |01/20 = Today is Tokunaga Sunao's and Iwano Houmei's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |01/21 = Today is Satomi Ton's death date. |01/22 = Today is Tayama Katai's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |01/25 = Today is Kitahara Hakushuu's birth and Nakano Shigeharu's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |01/27 = Today is Lewis Carroll's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |02/01 = Today is Tokuda Shuusei's birth and Kawahigashi Hekigotou's death date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |02/09 = Today is Natsume Souseki's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |02/12 = Today is Naoki Sanjuugo's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |02/15 = Today is Ibuse Masuji's birth and Tokunaga Sunao's death date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |02/17 = Today is Mori Ougai's birth, Kajii Motojirou's birth and Sakaguchi Ango's death date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |02/24 = Today is Naoki Sanjuugo's death date. |02/20 = Today is Ishikawa Takuboku's birth, Shiga Naoya's birth and Kobayashi Takiji's death date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |02/22 = Today is Takahama Kyoshi's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |02/26 = Today is Kawahigashi Hekigotou's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |02/28 = Today is Tsubouchi Shouyou's death date. |03/01 = Today is Akutagawa Ryuunosuke's birth and Kume Masao's death date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |03/03 = Today is Masamune Hakuchou's birth and Kikuchi Kan's death date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |03/04 = Today is Arishima Takeo's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |03/11 = Today is Yumeno Kyuusaku's death date. |03/13 = Today is Takamura Koutarou's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |03/17 = Today is Yokomitsu Riichi's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |03/22 = Today is Niimi Nankichi's death date. |03/24 = Today is Kajii Motojirou's death date. |03/25 = Today is Shimazaki Touson's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |03/26 = Today is Muroo Saisei's death date. |04/01 = Granblue Fantasy collab announced for next year! |04/02 = Today is Takamura Koutarou's death date. |04/04 = Today is Futabatei Shimei's and Nakazato Kaizan's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |04/05 = Today is Miyoshi Tatsuji's death date. |04/07 = Today is Ogawa Bimei's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |04/08 = Today is Takahama Kyoshi's death date. |04/09 = Today is Satou Haruo's birth and Mushanokouji Saneatsu's death date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |04/13 = Today is Ishikawa Takuboku's death date. |04/16 = Today is Kawabata Yasunari's death date. |04/28 = Today is Nakazato Kaizan's death date. |04/29 = Today is Nakahara Chuuya's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |04/30 = Today is Nagai Kafuu's death date. |05/05 = Today is Nakajima Atsushi's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |05/06 = Today is Satou Haruo's death date. |05/09 = Today is Iwano Houmei's death date. |05/10 = Today is Futabatei Shimei's death date. |05/11 = Today is Hagiwara Sakutarou's and Ogawa Bimei's death date. |05/12 = Today is Mushanokouji Saneatsu's and Kusano Shinpei's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |05/13 = Today is Tayama Katai's death date. |05/22 = Today is Conan Doyle's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |05/28 = Today is Hori Tatsuo's death date. |06/09 = Today is Arishima Takeo's death date. |06/13 = Today is Dazai Osamu's death date. |06/14 = Today is Kawabata Yasunari's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |06/19 = Today is Dazai Osamu's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |06/22 = Today is Tsubouchi Shouyou's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |06/23 = Today is Miki Rofuu's birth and Kunikida Doppo's death date. |06/27 = Today is Koizumi Yakumo's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |07/07 = Today is Conan Doyle's death date. |07/09 = Today is Mori Ougai's death date. |07/10 = Today is Ibuse Masuji's death date. |07/14 = Today is Satomi Ton's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |07/22 = Today is Matsuoka Yuzuru's death date. |07/24 = Today is Tanizaki Junichirou's birth and Akutagawa Ryuunosuke's death date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |07/27 = Today is Yamamoto Yuuzou's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |07/28 = Today is Edogawa Ranpo's death date. |07/30 = Today is Niimi Nankichi's birth date, Tanizaki Junichirou's, Kouda Rohan's and Itou Sachio's death date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |08/01 = Today is Muroo Saisei's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |08/11 = Today is Yoshikawa Eiji's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |08/22 = Today is Kouda Rohan's birth date and Shimazaki Touson's death date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |08/23 = Today is Miyoshi Tatsuji's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |08/24 = Today is Wakayama Bokusui's birth and Nakano Shigeharu's death date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |08/27 = Today is Miyazawa Kenji's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |08/30 = Today is Kunikida Doppo's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |09/07 = Today is Izumi Kyouka's death and Yoshikawa Eiji's death date. |09/17 = Today is Wakayama Bokusui's death date. |09/18 = Today is Itou Sachio's birth and Tokutomi Roka's death date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |09/19 = Today is Masaoka Shiki's death date. |09/21 = Today is Miyazawa Kenji's and Hirotsu Kazuo's death date. |09/26 = Today is Koizumi Yakumo's death date. |09/28 = Today is Matsuoka Yuzuru's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |10/07 = Today is Edgar Allan Poe's death date. |10/08 = Today is Yoshii Isamu's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |10/14 = Today is Masaoka Shiki's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |10/20 = Today is Sakaguchi Ango's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |10/21 = Today is Edogawa Ranpo's birth and Shiga Naoya's death date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |10/22 = Today is Nakahara Chuuya's death date. |10/26 = Today is Oda Sakunosuke's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |10/28 = Today is Masamune Hakuchou's death date. |10/30 = Today is Ozaki Kouyou's death date. |11/01 = Today is Hagiwara Sakutarou's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |11/02 = Today is Kitahara Hakushuu's death date. |11/04 = Today is Izumi Kyouka's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |11/09 = Today is Yoshii Isamu's death date. |11/12 = Today is Kusano Shinpei's death date. |11/18 = Today is Tokuda Shuusei's death date. |11/23 = Today is Kume Masao's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |12/01 = Today is Kobayashi Takiji's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |12/03 = Today is Nagai Kafuu's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |12/04 = Today is Nakajima Atsushi's death date. |12/05 = Today is Hirotsu Kazuo's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |12/08 = Today is Tokutomi Roka's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |12/09 = Today is Natsume Souseki's death date. |12/26 = Today is Kikuchi Kan's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |12/28 = Today is Hori Tatsuo's birth date. Click here to see the birthday recollection. |12/29 = Today is Miki Rofuu's death date. |12/30 = Today is Yokomitsu Riichi's death date. | Izumi Kyouka liked rabbit goods and cleanliness. Dazai Osamu attempted to commit suicide 5 times in total. He finally succeeded in killing himself at 39 years old together with his mistress, and his body was found on June 19, his birthday. Akutagawa Ryuunosuke's letter to Fumi Tsukamoto, who later became his wife, has a line that reads: “You are so cute that I’d like to eat you from your head if you were a sweetie. I am not lying." Shimazaki Touson had an interest in Western works, like Dante and Shakespeare's, and he translated Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis'. Kitahara Hakushuu's 'Society of Pan', created to promote aestheticism and "art for art's sake" attracted young talented writers, including Takamura Koutarou, Tanizaki Junichirou, Osanai Kaoru, Nagai Kafuu, and Watsuji Tetsurou. Akutagawa Ryuunosuke was Natsume Souseki's disciple, and it is said that Akutagawa could not hold back his tears at his mentor's funeral. Nagai Kafuu married twice, but both times were unsuccessful because of his promiscuity. He also had innumerable liaisons with geishas, prostitutes, waitresses, and other women available for money. Despite his unsuccessful love affairs, Shimazaki Touson is sometimes said to be the foremost writer of love poetry in the Meiji era. Apparently, he drew his materials from the stories he's read. The text on the background of the game's title and Blossoming screen is from Akutagawa Ryuunosuke's most famous short story Rashoumon. When Oda Sakunosuke was on his deathbed, Dazai Osamu tried to come see him, but he did not make it in time. When Dazai arrived, he had a disheveled appearance completely different from how he usually tried to look in front of other people. Nagai Kafuu's father sent him to America to learn English and something of business after having failed to convince him to do so in Japan. Kitahara Hakushuu had frail health and a high-strung disposition when he was a child. Kitahara Hakushuu first started out writing tanka. However, once, he described Kaguyama mountain as female and a critic insisted in a long article that the mountain was male, and he got so annoyed that he abandoned tanka for modern poetry. Izumi Kyouka lived in mortal dread of dogs and lighting, and was so devout that whenever he passed before a Shinto shrine or Buddhist temple he would bow in worship, first removing his glasses so that nothing would stand between himself and the divinities. Later in life Shimazaki Touson left the world of poetry for prose, presumably because he had exhausted his capacity for lyricism. Hagiwara Sakutarou was so immersed in poetry that he did not graduate from middle school until he was 20 years old and graduated high school at 25 years old. Muroo Saisei was the illegitimate child of an elderly ex-samurai and a household maid. Embarrassed, his father left him at a nearby temple where he was raised by the priest and his common-law wife. Miyazawa Kenji is known to have written three long poems, including one over 900 lines in length, in three days. Takamura Koutarou thinks of himself as more of a sculptor than a poet, but ultimately his poetry enjoys far greater popularity. Takamura Koutarou's most famous poems are about his wife, Chieko, who he absolutely adored. Several of those poems describe her insanity later in life. Nakano Shigeharu attended Tokyo University, where he associated with literarily minded students like Hori Tatsuo. Nakahara Chuuya spent a month in jail for smashing street lamps while in a drunken rage. Great writers as diverse as Tanizaki Junichirou, Akutagawa Ryuunosuke and Mishima Yukio acknowledged Mori Ougai as their teacher. Nagai Kafuu was a hermit, known for eccentric habits and rarely seen except for in the presence of chorus girls. Tayama Katai was a pupil of a pupil of Ozaki Kouyou, and he has declared that the latter's Confession of Love made a great impact on him. Kitahara Hakushuu was arrested in July 1912 on accusations of having seduced his neighbor's wife. He was acquitted, but he quit the world of poetry in which he was a famous figure. Miyazawa Kenji was the son of a pawnbroker, but he turned against commerce out of sympathy for the farmers who patronized his father's shop. Miyazawa Kenji's early poetry seems to have been influenced by Ishikawa Takuboku and Kitahara Hakushuu. Nakajima Atsushi's 'Light, Wind and Dreams' was a finalist for the Akutagawa Prize. Nakajima Atsushi graduated from the Japanese Literature Department of Tokyo Imperial University. His graduation thesis was 'A Study of the Aesthetic School', focusing on the literature and style of Nagai Kafuu and Tanizaki Junichirou. Nakahara Chuuya translated around 60 poems by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud into Japanese. Due to their similar lifestyles, he gained the nickname 'The Japanese Rimbaud'. Kikuchi Kan, who wrote the screenplay 'The Father Returns', said that in its first performance he himself wept uncontrollably. Akutagawa Ryuunosuke, seated beside him, also wept. Akutagawa Ryuunosuke disliked dogs and large baths. Nagai Kafuu was unusually fond of opera and regularly attended the Metropolitan Opera during his stay in America. Nagai Kafuu recounted the time he met Mori Ougai and found out the latter had read his work, The Flowers of Hell, "Never since my debut in the literary world had I felt so elated and honored. ...I returned home, my head filled, as I walked, with all kinds of rosy images of my future." The name 'Shirakaba', or 'White Birch' of the White Birch Faction came to be both because of its freshness and the association of birches with Russian literature, which all of the group's members read devotedly. Akutagawa Ryuunosuke once wrote in an essay in his later years that the appearance of the Shirakabaha was like 'a skylight admitting fresh air into the oppressive atmosphere of the literary world'. Miyoshi Tatsuji believed Nakahara Chuuya was deficient both in language and poetic techniques, and seemed to begrudge the necessary efforts to improve his writings. Nakajima Atsushi is almost never called a post-war author, even though he belongs to the same generations as iconic post-war authors like Dazai Osamu. Mori Ougai's most well-known book, Vita Sexualis, was censored as a threat to public morals, but the work actually demonstrated his conviction that not all men are governed by lusts. Dazai Osamu admired Nakahara Chuuya because of his prodigious talent, but after meeting and subsequently being terrorized by a drunk Nakahara Chuuya, he grew to resent him. Izumi Kyouka's stories often deal with the supernatural, and love - whether the self-sacrificing devotion of a geisha to a young man or the vengeance of a ghost for unrequited passion - is his main theme. In accordance to his wishes, Dazai Osamu's tombstone at Zenrin-ji, Mitaka City stands diagonally opposite to and facing Mori Ougai's. When Izumi Kyouka was under Ozaki Kouyou's tutelage, the latter discovered that Kyouka was secretly living with a geisha, and ordered him to pay the woman and get rid of her. This later becomes the basis for Kyouka's novel, 'A Woman's Pedigree'. Izumi Kyouka admired Ozaki Kouyou and once composed several practice pieces to write Kouyou asking for permission to become his disciple. The letter was never answered. There is a surviving picture of Dazai Osamu's notebook in high school, in which he scribbled Akutagawa Ryuunosuke's name multiple times. Izumi Kyouka never resented Ozaki Kouyou for preventing his marriage with a geisha. Instead, he only married her after Kouyou's death. Nagai Kafuu married twice, but both times were unsuccessful because of his promiscuity. Oda Sakunosuke fell in love with and married a waitress, Miyata Kazue. He loved her deeply and carried around a lock of her hair, after she died of cancer, until his death. Nakajima Atsushi admired Mori Ougai. In contrast to Akutagawa Ryuunosuke, to whom he is sometimes compared, Nakajima Atsushi endeavored to overcome his awareness that life may be ultimately meaningless by trying to create his own meaning through his actions. Tanizaki Junichirou greatly disliked visitors, and even more so if they were male. However, his face would light up whenever he saw a female. Nakahara Chuuya had a mistress, Hasegawa Yasuko, at age 17. In November 1925, she left him to live with his best friend Kobayashi Hideo, which frustrated Nakahara greatly. Nakahara Chuuya's old mistress Hasegawa Yasuko, after his death, established the Nakahara Chuuya Prize to honor him. Ishikawa Takuboku once wrote "I have read most of the recently published novels. Natsume Souseki and Shimazaki Touson are both well-educated novelists, and they are the only ones worth considering. The rest are all hopeless." This is impressive considering that at the time, each of those authors have only published only one book of importance. Akutagawa Ryuunosuke had a bitter argument with Tanizaki Junichirou because of their different views on literature - Akutagawa valued lyricism, while Tanizaki preferred structure. Nakahara Chuuya looked up to Miyazawa Kenji, and he had been noted to hum Miyazawa's poems from time to time. Dazai Osamu was so desperate for the Akutagawa Prize that he once prostrated before his mentor Satou Haruo, who was also one of the judges, to beg for the Prize. Nakahara Chuuya's surname was Kashiwamura Chuuya as a child. Later he changed his surname to Nakahara after his mother's family, which was more wealthy than his father's side. Nakahara Chuuya was a genius prodigy and submitted his first poetry to literary magazines in elementary school. Nakahara Chuuya failed middle school because by that time he was too engrossed in literature. By the 1930s, Muroo Saisei entered his era of writing novels and published a book titled “Goodbye Poem, I am breaking up with you” in 1934 as his declaration of farewell to poetry, but he actually had composed quite a lot of poems even after this public announcement. Kunikida Doppo has a great-great-granddaughter, Saila Kunikida, who is a model. Despite Ishikawa Takuboku's origins in a remote village of Iwate Prefecture, he could read classical Chinese and English works with confidence. He also read classical Japanese for pleasure, taught himself to play the violin and organ, and diligently read newspapers. It's ironic that he should have been expelled from middle school for cheating on exams. Hagiwara Sakutarou continually failed the Japanese language class. His self-proclaimed disciple Miyoshi Tatsuji used to correct his master's misspellings before he took Hagiwara's manuscripts to the publisher. Hagiwara Sakutarou knows how to play mandolin and guitar, and was the founder and conductor of a musician's club in his hometown. Ishikawa Takuboku wanted to become a novelist. It's only later in life that he realized his talents as an improvisator were more suited to tanka. Satou Haruo first pitied Tanizaki Junichirou's unloved wife, but this pity then turned to mutual love and Satou finally asked Tanizaki to yield his wife. Tanizaki refused and broke all relations with Satou. Tanizaki finally agreed to yield and let Satou marry her in 1930. Hori Tatsuo was so devoted to Hagiwara Sakutarou's poetry that he could not bear to hear it criticized. Oda Sakunosuke's friends would avoid him while he was writing a novel for fear he would portray them in some thin disguise. Akutagawa Ryuunosuke never wrote a single love story. Takamura Koutarou contributed notable amount for the White Birch magazine and was in good terms with Mushanokouji Saneatsu and other members of the group, especially with fellow artists like Arishima Takeo's younger brother Arishima Ikuma. Arishima Takeo wrote his diary mostly in English, especially during the years he spent abroad and later when he taught English in his alma mater. Kunikida Doppo and Miki Rofuu were distant relatives (Doppo's great-grandmother was from the Miki family). After Doppo's death, Rofuu was assigned to publish a collection of his poems. Naoki Sanjuugo was known for quite questionable reputation among the literature world. He had openly addressed himself as playboy and boasted how at one point he hadn't paid rent for seven months. Some of his writings were also rather harsh; him wishing the death of some fellow authors or writing dirty about them otherwise. }}